Parliament chief: Guinea-Bissau 'very delicate'

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau (AP) -- The man in line to become Guinea-Bissau's interim leader briefly addressed the nation Tuesday for the first time since the president's assassination brought about a power vacuum.

Parliamentary leader Raimundo Pereira, who will become interim president according to the constitution, said the West African country "is facing a very delicate situation."

In his comments, he called on the other delegates "to assume their responsibility toward the nation" in ensuring calm and the rule of law in the former Portuguese colony, which is struggling to stem a booming cocaine trade.

The military has blamed an "isolated group" of soldiers for Monday's assassination of President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira, who had ruled Guinea-Bissau for 22 of the past 29 years.

The military categorically denied the assassination was retribution for the killing one day earlier of Vieira's longtime rival, armed forces chief of staff Gen. Batiste Tagme na Waie. Waie was killed Sunday night when a bomb hidden inside his office went off.

Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua, who heads ECOWAS, a regional bloc of 15 African states, has dispatched a delegation to investigate. "The fragile political situation in Guinea-Bissau has been further weakened by these events," he said.

The country has suffered multiple coups and attempted coups since 1980 when Vieira himself took power in one. He was forced out 19 years later at the onset of the country's civil war, later returning from exile in Portugal to run in the country's 2005 election and win the vote.

A member of the minority Papel ethnic group, Vieira was in many ways an outsider. He always had a tense relationship with the army, which like the country is made up primarily of officers from the majority Balanta ethnic group.

In the 1980s, after renegade soldiers attempted a coup against him, Vieira went after the top Balanta officers, systematically purging them in military tribunals that condemned them to death.

Waie was one of the Balanta soldiers accused of plotting the coup and although he was not killed, he was dropped off on a deserted island off the coast of the country and left there for years before being allowed to come back.

Vieira's death creates a dangerous opening in light of the country's appeal to cocaine smugglers.

While demand for cocaine has leveled off in the U.S., it continues to rise in Europe, forcing Latin American drug cartels to aggressively seek new routes to smuggle cocaine to Europe. In recent years, they have begun flying small, twin-engine planes to Africa's West coast, where they land on deserted islands or on dirt runways and then parcel out the drugs to dozens of smugglers who ferry them north.

Guinea-Bissau, ringed by an archipelago of uninhabited islands, has become a key transit point for Europe-bound cocaine, with the government estimating that as much as 1,750 pounds (800 kilograms) of the drug is transiting the country's borders each week. It's an amount worth billions of dollars per year, dwarfing all other economic sectors.

While the twin assassinations do not appear to be drug-related, analysts point out that the use of a bomb to kill Waie is highly unusual in West Africa, where assassinations and coups d'etat are still the domain of the Kalashnikov.

Antonio Mazzitelli, West Africa director for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said he could not think of another instance when a bomb was used in a killing in the region. It could indicate that the killing of Waie was contracted out to a foreign group -- possibly linked to the Colombian drug cartel believed to be active in the country.

(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)